Parents who allow their kids to have smartphones and tablets might end up rewarding their kids with sleepless nights.

Researchers at King’s College London and Cardiff University have looked at 11 studies and discovered that smartphones and tablets in bedrooms disrupt the sleep of children even if they are switched off.

They found that using smartphones or tablets before bedtime doubled the risk of a disrupted night’s sleep and doubled the chances of feeling excessively sleepy the following day. Sleep was also significantly disturbed by the mere presence of devices – almost to the same level as actually using it. This suggests that if you want your precious snowflake to sleep you should remove them from the bedroom. In the case of the iPhone you should also hit it with a hammer several times – the iPhone not the kid.

Apparently the issue is that the ‘always on’ nature of social media and instant messaging means children are continuously stimulated by devices in their environment, even when they are not using them.

Dr Ben Carter, of King’s College London, said: “Our study provides further proof of the detrimental effect of media devices on both sleep duration and quality.

“Sleep is an often undervalued but important part of children’s development, with a regular lack of sleep causing a variety of health problems. With the ever growing popularity of portable media devices and their use in schools as a replacement for textbooks, the problem of poor sleep amongst children is likely to get worse.”

Boffins at the University of Minnesota have come up with a way of downloading porn at a super speed by using a microscale optical device. They claim that it could greatly increase the speed of downloading information online and reduce the cost of Internet transmission.

The device uses the force generated by light to flop a mechanical switch of light on and off at a high speed. It could mean advances in computation and signal processing using light, instead of electrical current with higher performance and lower power consumption.

According to the online journal Nature Communications, which we get for its Spot the Bucky Ball competition, the system is similar to electromechanical relays but operates completely with light. Mo Li, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering said that the study is based on a previous discovery by Li and collaborators in 2008 where they found that nanoscale light conduits can be used to generate a strong enough optical force with light to mechanically move the optical waveguide.

In the new device, the researchers found that this force of light is so strong that the mechanical property of the device can be dominated completely by the optical effect rather than its own mechanical structure.

A team of American and Israeli boffins have used twisted vortex beams to transmit data at 2.5 terabits per second.

This makes it about the fastest wireless network that we can think of. The technique is likely to be used in the next few years.

Twisted signals use orbital angular momentum to stuff more data into a single stream. WiFi, LTE, COFDM modulates the spin angular momentum of radio waves, not the angular momentum.

The boffins, Alan Willner and fellow researchers from the University of Southern California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, twisted together eight ~300Gbps visible light data streams using orbital angular moment. Each of the eight beams has a different level of twist.

The beams are bundled into two groups of four, which are passed through different polarization filters. One bundle of four is transmitted as a thin stream while the other four are transmitted around the outside.

The beam is then transmitted over open space (just one meter in this case), and untwisted and processed by the receiving end. 2.5 terabits per second is equivalent to 320 gigabytes per second, or around seven full Blu-ray movies per second. Needless to say there is a lot of porn that can be shifted on that sort of network.

Computer scientists at the University of Glasgow are developing a search engine which will draw its results from physical world sensors.The European-funded project, known as SMART, for ‘Search engine for MultimediA Environment geneRated contenT’, aims to develop a system to allow internet users to search and analyze data from these sensors.

By matching search queries with information from sensors and cross-referencing data from social networks such as Twitter, users will be able to receive detailed responses to questions such as ‘What part of the city hosts live music events which my friends have been to recently?’ or ‘How busy is the city centre?’ Currently, standard search engines such as Google are not able to answer search queries of this type.

Dr. Ladh Ounis, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, said that the SMART project will be built upon an open-source search engine technology known as Terrier. “The SMART engine will be able to answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors that can contribute to the query, then synthesizing results stemming from distributed sources in an intelligent way.

The SMART project is a joint research initiative of nine partners including Atos, Athens Information Technology, IBM’s Haifa Research Lab, Imperial College London, City of Santander, PRISA Digital, Telesto and Consorzio S3 Log. It is expected to be tested in a real city by 2014.

Forbes is reportingthat scientists in New South Wales, Australia, have created a single atom transistor. The actual transistor is composed of a single atom of the phosphorous-31 isotope.

This single atom was precisely placed on a base of silicon using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope in an ultra-high vacuum chamber. The unique part of the technique that was employed was that they were able to position and confirm the individual phosphorous atoms precisely on the silicon.

There is still a long way to go for researchers as they will need to build off of this technology to develop chips comprised of many P-31 transistors that are able to be used for calculations. The current cost of the technology is also incredibly expensive.

The experiment details have been published hereand you can also view a YouTube video here.

Boffins at Northwestern University working on lithium-ion batteries have worked out a way to make them last a lot longer. By layering clusters of silicon in between the graphene sheets that make up one side of the battery - known as the anode - the researchers were able to pack in a lot more lithium.

The researchers poked holes in the graphene, providing a shortcut for the lithium to travel through and be stored by a reaction with the silicon. What it means is that by tweaking traditional lithium-ion technology it is possible to last a week and can be charged in 15 minutes. Sadly though it will be another four years before this technology hits the shops.

Boffins at the University of Michigan researchers have come up with a new power management system for smartphones that could improve battery life by 50 per cent.

Xinyu Zhang and Kang Shin have created a proof-of-concept system known as E-MiLi, or Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening. This fixes the energy waste that occurs when "sleeping" phones are looking for incoming messages and clear communication channels.

E-MiLi slows down the clock of a phone's WiFi card by up to 1/16 its normal frequency in order to save power, but then kicks it back up to full speed when information is coming in. The phone uses the header of the incoming message to wake itself up from its "subconscious mode," so the clock is at a full speed to receive the main message.

It does require firmware to be installed on phones and other devices that would be sending them. The header would need to be encoded in such a way that the receiving phone could detect it too. Shin and Zhang have created such firmware, but WiFi chipset manufacturers would have to adopt it, and then smartphone manufacturers would in turn have to start using those chips.

Boffins claim that they have created a self-powered nano-device that can transmit data wirelessly over long distances. According to ACS's journal, Nano Letters, they say it proves it is possible to make tiny gear that operates independently without batteries on energy collected from the environment.

Zhong Lin Wang wrote that that advances in electronics have opened the door to developing tiny devices that operate battery-free on minute amounts of electricity that can be harvested from the pulse of a blood vessel or a person walking. It should be possible to drive the devices by taking energy from sources in the environment such as gentle airflow, vibration, sonic wave, solar, chemical, and/or thermal energy.

Each nano device is made up of a nanogenerator that produces electricity from mechanical vibration or triggering, a capacitor to store the energy, and electronics that include a sensor and a radio transmitter. Their device transmitted wireless signals that could be detected by an ordinary commercial radio.

Boffins from Switzerland and Germany are to build a computer model of a human brain, dubbed the Human Brain Project. The team is trying to get a £1billion grant and claim that if they succeed in building a brain on a computer they could find cures for various diseases like Parkinson's.

Henry Markram, director of the Human Brain Project in Switzerland claims that the project could lead to intelligent robots and supercomputers which would dwarf those currently in existence. Markram is a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland. He said that humanity needs to understand what makes us human.’ He thinks that if they secure the funding, they will be able to replicate mankind's most vital organ in 12 years.

It would mean that drug companies could dramatically shorten testing times by bypassing humans to test new medicaments on the computer model. Supercomputers at the Jülich Research Center near Cologne are earmarked to play a vital role in the research which Makram says will involve ‘a tsunami of data.’

Boffins from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Illinois have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a new low-power memory which uses much less power and is faster. It will mean that consumer devices like smartphones and laptops will have a much longer battery life and probably lead to peace in our lunchtime.

For a while boffins have been playing around with phase-change materials (PCM) as an alternative to the kind of memory that stores bits as a charge. The good side of PCM is that each bit is stored in the resistance of the material itself and can be reversibly switched with short voltage pulses.

This means that you get low voltage operation, fast access times and high endurance. However the problem was that you needed a high programming current to couple Joule heat to finite bit volume, which is a bit of a downer.

Professor Eric Pop managed to lower the power per bit to a fraction of that used for existing PCM by using carbon nanotubes. The device is initially in the off state until a voltage is applied to the nanotube that switches the PCM bit to an on state.